Epilogue 1
Wally does his homework.
It didn't take Clark long to recover his appetite, once Kurt turned the equivalent of a white sun on him. There wasn't enough left of the armored building to make it worth rebuilding, though. Wally took off with Wynter when the boy's control began to waver ("excitable," Wynter reminded Wally), but they both still got a sunburn. Wally considered the disadvantages of being a redhead. Bruce changed just in time to keep from getting fried himself. He grumbled about the green skin peeling to dull gray the whole trip back.
The science classes were much more humiliating than being stymied, however temporarily, by a few lousy CIA rogues. Though Bruce publicly took back his comment about Wally being hopeless. "I missed that sniper cold, son. If you hadn't been there, he might have gotten Wynter and Kal-El both. That was some fast thinking on your feet."
But even Kurt beat both Clark and Wally on everything from energy measurements (not surprising, Wynter and the other energy-handling Specials had been force-feeding Kurt the necessary control of his talent for years) to orbital trajectories (Kurt was a space nut, with models and posters everywhere -- he'd nearly burned down the admin building in joy when he found out that Clark was an alien -- and had played space exploration games on the computer since he was six, but nobody told Wally that).
Wally caught on to tangents and vectors eventually, but Bruce had to go lock himself in Nicole's room to keep Clark from hearing him laugh so hard he almost changed accidentally when he checked Clark's results -- if Kal-El was ever going to master his flying talent, he was going to have to learn the difference between a parabola and a hyperbola. Even in the bad old days, Hulk could hit a target better than Clark could.
Wally and Clark even lost to three teenage girls on the velocity equation tests, which was seriously embarrassing for the speedsters. Wally fumed and Clark sulked until Wynter and Bruce took pity on them and admitted that they'd been set up to compete against field agents in training, including a natural weapons expert and one who could teleport small objects.
Wally decided to find that funny for a change and take it in stride. Clark continued to sulk.
Unfortunately for Wally, aside from the fully-stocked 24-hour food service area and the chance to race Clark and wear out shoes until he was actually tired enough to sleep for eight hours straight, Wynter and Bruce and their other instructors cut them no other slack.
"I'll take hazardous duty over the ten-hour school days any time, even without combat pay," Wally grumbled over and over. "When do we freaking graduate from this torture chamber?"
He didn't believe it when Clark smirked at him and told him that the next round of lessons were going to be way worse. He didn't believe it when Wynter threw his hands in the air and proclaimed them "the two most stubborn ignorant brats who've ever been through here." He didn't believe it even when Kurt had the audacity to wink at him and called him a plain old ordinary human, and wait'll you see the laser course, and boy, you better hope Chloe never meets Dylana, because she cheats.
He finally believed it when the Hulk came up behind him (he still nearly jumped out of his sneakers when Bruce did that in his big green persona), shook his head at the answers on his screen, put his hand on his shoulder, and simply said "You don't."
* * * * *
Epilogue 2
Lake and Nicole. Fair warning. Not comic-book type violence.
Skip to Epilogue 3 if you want the fun stuff and don't want to risk nightmares.
Jackson and his compatriots whispered their plans to each other as well as they could. All of them had been injured by the green monster, but that just served to sharpen their fervor. When they broke free, they were going to tell the world about the monsters and menaces and the alien invader. They were going to have them all locked up and dissected alive. They were going to indulge their darkest fantasies against the not-humans. They would have their revenge.
The door to their cubicle opened. Ronald, just as they had planned, positioned himself to smash the face or neck of whoever it was, and use the commotion to summon any other guards.
Ronald, much to his astonishment, suddenly found himself paralyzed, unable to even breathe. He would have collapsed, except that his muscles couldn't move. The cessation of sound from the others indicated that they were similarly frozen.
A small pale woman walked into the room, casually, as if looking around in a museum. A large dark woman followed her, closing the door behind her with exaggerated carefulness, and leaned against it with her arms crossed as if bored.
The conspirators discovered that they could breathe again, but their first attempt at a concerted rush proved that they had not been released from whatever force was holding them.
The small woman with the glacier eyes walked around them slowly, one finger lightly stroking her lower lip in consideration. "They were pretty good," she said reluctantly, directing her comment to her partner. "No legal evidence linking them to their boss, and we can't bring him down without revealing our own insiders. No way of exposing this particular neo-con traitor cell without exposing Kal-El. And the coded contact information went back through their official lines. We'll have to dismantle half the CIA to get the rest of them."
"You can't touch us, bitch!" Jackson snarled. "When we get back -- "
He was cut off by his own attempt to scream as Lake's psycho-telekinetic touch flitted through the pain center of his brain while she also shut down the rest of his nerves. The others discovered that they couldn't breathe again, either.
Nicole, leaning against the door, shook her head. She could have told them to tread cautiously, if she hadn't felt like doing a "Hulk smash" on these turds herself. When Lake touched her lips like that, even Nicole treaded carefully.
"Get back?" Lake said softly. "Hm. Where, and when, you 'get back' to, will depend on just how useful you prove." She circled them again, and let her hand slip down and her eyes hood in a way that anyone who didn't know her would have found sensual. "To me."
Anyone who did know Lake would have run screaming as far and as fast as they could. Not that it would have done them any good.
Lake leaned over, her slim body making a very nearly suggestive pose. "You can 'get back' to hell now, or you can enjoy it here for awhile."
Nicole was glad mostly that they had lined the place with lead and electronic interrupters. Wally and Bruce hadn't been given full access to the file on Lake yet, and Clark's morbid curious speculation about what he did know would be giving him a hard enough time keeping food down as it was, without being tempted to actually watch their interrogation.
She took out her pad and marker. It always amused the laboratory creation that she was the one to play good cop to the mostly-human Lake's bad cop. Lake was also better at taking dictation, but if Nicole missed a word here and there, that was just too bad. A voice recorder would have been useless through the screams.
* * * * *
Epilogue 3
There's homework, and then there's homework
"Three, two one." Wynter clicked his stopwatch. Clark and Wally were invisible before his thumb let up.
Wally and Clark's teen-male-caveman competitiveness had changed, subtly but perceptibly, since Wally's participation in the capture and rescue. Clark still insulted Wally, but it was unmistakably toned with respect. Wally still teased Clark, but in their more serious moments (and not just when Clark was arguing with Bruce about homework), Wynter wasn't the only one to detect both sympathy and a certain deference from him.
(The idea of arguing with Bruce still terrified Wally, even when he wasn't in big green form. Wally got positively circle-eyed when Clark would throw a minor snit-fit at the Hulk over being corrected during a chemistry lab.)
Wynter had hopes of the two becoming a good team some day. Wally was no match for Lex in the power and fascination department, but he was something that Kal-El needed far more -- a companion who already understood the other side.
Wally reappeared in what looked like a tumbling roll, head over heels over teakettle. Wynter spared a second of severe concern until he realized that Wally was holding his stomach laughing.
"Eleven thousand six hundred fifty kph, give or take five, not bad," Wynter calculated, glancing at the stopwatch. "Counting the turnaround. Unless you cut a corner. What's so damn funny, and where's Kal-El?"
Wally was still giggling when Clark slid to a stop, red faced, with that all-too-Clark expression of mixed humiliation and resentment. "Shut up," he half-whined, half-snarled at Wally.
Wally only laughed harder. "Superboy there," he wheezed, waving a hand weakly in Clark's direction, "he," gasp, "he ran into," snort, "a STOP sign."
Wynter looked back and forth between them in disbelief. Sure enough, there were shreds of metal and bits of asphalt in Clark's hair. The steel that had disintegrated when Clark went through it with enough energy to partially melt it had curled into what looked like ringlets.
Clark sulked. Wynter threw his hands in the air. Wally managed to quit having hysterics for a tenth of a second -- long enough to catch the stopwatch, at least.
* * * * *
a/n: yes, I'm the metallurgist, but the steel ringlets are entirely LaCasta's fault. Go leave snarky reviews on her stuff. And for pity's sake, don't give Becs any more ideas!
Wally does his homework.
It didn't take Clark long to recover his appetite, once Kurt turned the equivalent of a white sun on him. There wasn't enough left of the armored building to make it worth rebuilding, though. Wally took off with Wynter when the boy's control began to waver ("excitable," Wynter reminded Wally), but they both still got a sunburn. Wally considered the disadvantages of being a redhead. Bruce changed just in time to keep from getting fried himself. He grumbled about the green skin peeling to dull gray the whole trip back.
The science classes were much more humiliating than being stymied, however temporarily, by a few lousy CIA rogues. Though Bruce publicly took back his comment about Wally being hopeless. "I missed that sniper cold, son. If you hadn't been there, he might have gotten Wynter and Kal-El both. That was some fast thinking on your feet."
But even Kurt beat both Clark and Wally on everything from energy measurements (not surprising, Wynter and the other energy-handling Specials had been force-feeding Kurt the necessary control of his talent for years) to orbital trajectories (Kurt was a space nut, with models and posters everywhere -- he'd nearly burned down the admin building in joy when he found out that Clark was an alien -- and had played space exploration games on the computer since he was six, but nobody told Wally that).
Wally caught on to tangents and vectors eventually, but Bruce had to go lock himself in Nicole's room to keep Clark from hearing him laugh so hard he almost changed accidentally when he checked Clark's results -- if Kal-El was ever going to master his flying talent, he was going to have to learn the difference between a parabola and a hyperbola. Even in the bad old days, Hulk could hit a target better than Clark could.
Wally and Clark even lost to three teenage girls on the velocity equation tests, which was seriously embarrassing for the speedsters. Wally fumed and Clark sulked until Wynter and Bruce took pity on them and admitted that they'd been set up to compete against field agents in training, including a natural weapons expert and one who could teleport small objects.
Wally decided to find that funny for a change and take it in stride. Clark continued to sulk.
Unfortunately for Wally, aside from the fully-stocked 24-hour food service area and the chance to race Clark and wear out shoes until he was actually tired enough to sleep for eight hours straight, Wynter and Bruce and their other instructors cut them no other slack.
"I'll take hazardous duty over the ten-hour school days any time, even without combat pay," Wally grumbled over and over. "When do we freaking graduate from this torture chamber?"
He didn't believe it when Clark smirked at him and told him that the next round of lessons were going to be way worse. He didn't believe it when Wynter threw his hands in the air and proclaimed them "the two most stubborn ignorant brats who've ever been through here." He didn't believe it even when Kurt had the audacity to wink at him and called him a plain old ordinary human, and wait'll you see the laser course, and boy, you better hope Chloe never meets Dylana, because she cheats.
He finally believed it when the Hulk came up behind him (he still nearly jumped out of his sneakers when Bruce did that in his big green persona), shook his head at the answers on his screen, put his hand on his shoulder, and simply said "You don't."
* * * * *
Epilogue 2
Lake and Nicole. Fair warning. Not comic-book type violence.
Skip to Epilogue 3 if you want the fun stuff and don't want to risk nightmares.
Jackson and his compatriots whispered their plans to each other as well as they could. All of them had been injured by the green monster, but that just served to sharpen their fervor. When they broke free, they were going to tell the world about the monsters and menaces and the alien invader. They were going to have them all locked up and dissected alive. They were going to indulge their darkest fantasies against the not-humans. They would have their revenge.
The door to their cubicle opened. Ronald, just as they had planned, positioned himself to smash the face or neck of whoever it was, and use the commotion to summon any other guards.
Ronald, much to his astonishment, suddenly found himself paralyzed, unable to even breathe. He would have collapsed, except that his muscles couldn't move. The cessation of sound from the others indicated that they were similarly frozen.
A small pale woman walked into the room, casually, as if looking around in a museum. A large dark woman followed her, closing the door behind her with exaggerated carefulness, and leaned against it with her arms crossed as if bored.
The conspirators discovered that they could breathe again, but their first attempt at a concerted rush proved that they had not been released from whatever force was holding them.
The small woman with the glacier eyes walked around them slowly, one finger lightly stroking her lower lip in consideration. "They were pretty good," she said reluctantly, directing her comment to her partner. "No legal evidence linking them to their boss, and we can't bring him down without revealing our own insiders. No way of exposing this particular neo-con traitor cell without exposing Kal-El. And the coded contact information went back through their official lines. We'll have to dismantle half the CIA to get the rest of them."
"You can't touch us, bitch!" Jackson snarled. "When we get back -- "
He was cut off by his own attempt to scream as Lake's psycho-telekinetic touch flitted through the pain center of his brain while she also shut down the rest of his nerves. The others discovered that they couldn't breathe again, either.
Nicole, leaning against the door, shook her head. She could have told them to tread cautiously, if she hadn't felt like doing a "Hulk smash" on these turds herself. When Lake touched her lips like that, even Nicole treaded carefully.
"Get back?" Lake said softly. "Hm. Where, and when, you 'get back' to, will depend on just how useful you prove." She circled them again, and let her hand slip down and her eyes hood in a way that anyone who didn't know her would have found sensual. "To me."
Anyone who did know Lake would have run screaming as far and as fast as they could. Not that it would have done them any good.
Lake leaned over, her slim body making a very nearly suggestive pose. "You can 'get back' to hell now, or you can enjoy it here for awhile."
Nicole was glad mostly that they had lined the place with lead and electronic interrupters. Wally and Bruce hadn't been given full access to the file on Lake yet, and Clark's morbid curious speculation about what he did know would be giving him a hard enough time keeping food down as it was, without being tempted to actually watch their interrogation.
She took out her pad and marker. It always amused the laboratory creation that she was the one to play good cop to the mostly-human Lake's bad cop. Lake was also better at taking dictation, but if Nicole missed a word here and there, that was just too bad. A voice recorder would have been useless through the screams.
* * * * *
Epilogue 3
There's homework, and then there's homework
"Three, two one." Wynter clicked his stopwatch. Clark and Wally were invisible before his thumb let up.
Wally and Clark's teen-male-caveman competitiveness had changed, subtly but perceptibly, since Wally's participation in the capture and rescue. Clark still insulted Wally, but it was unmistakably toned with respect. Wally still teased Clark, but in their more serious moments (and not just when Clark was arguing with Bruce about homework), Wynter wasn't the only one to detect both sympathy and a certain deference from him.
(The idea of arguing with Bruce still terrified Wally, even when he wasn't in big green form. Wally got positively circle-eyed when Clark would throw a minor snit-fit at the Hulk over being corrected during a chemistry lab.)
Wynter had hopes of the two becoming a good team some day. Wally was no match for Lex in the power and fascination department, but he was something that Kal-El needed far more -- a companion who already understood the other side.
Wally reappeared in what looked like a tumbling roll, head over heels over teakettle. Wynter spared a second of severe concern until he realized that Wally was holding his stomach laughing.
"Eleven thousand six hundred fifty kph, give or take five, not bad," Wynter calculated, glancing at the stopwatch. "Counting the turnaround. Unless you cut a corner. What's so damn funny, and where's Kal-El?"
Wally was still giggling when Clark slid to a stop, red faced, with that all-too-Clark expression of mixed humiliation and resentment. "Shut up," he half-whined, half-snarled at Wally.
Wally only laughed harder. "Superboy there," he wheezed, waving a hand weakly in Clark's direction, "he," gasp, "he ran into," snort, "a STOP sign."
Wynter looked back and forth between them in disbelief. Sure enough, there were shreds of metal and bits of asphalt in Clark's hair. The steel that had disintegrated when Clark went through it with enough energy to partially melt it had curled into what looked like ringlets.
Clark sulked. Wynter threw his hands in the air. Wally managed to quit having hysterics for a tenth of a second -- long enough to catch the stopwatch, at least.
* * * * *
a/n: yes, I'm the metallurgist, but the steel ringlets are entirely LaCasta's fault. Go leave snarky reviews on her stuff. And for pity's sake, don't give Becs any more ideas!